Philosophy of the Performing Arts

182 performance as art
predisposition to attend to the performance. Berthold would obviously say
that the performers in the provincial theater failed to live up to this responsibility,
although the performers might respond that visiting aesthetes like Berthold
were not their intended audience!
Philosophers have reflected upon the nature of the attention that is
demanded by an artistic performance. James Hamilton, for example, offers
a general analysis of what it is to attend to someone or something (2007,
ch. 4). Attention requires a sensitivity to particular events involving, or par-
ticular features manifested by, the focus of one’s attention. Which events or
features these are is determined by the nature of the situation calling for such
attention. One must also be prepared to respond in different ways if par-
ticular events or features of the relevant kind occur. To what range of events
and features, then, should we be sensitive if we are members of the audience
for an artistic performance, and how should we respond to these events and
features if they transpire? And what must performers do if they are to sustain
an audience’s attention?
A traditional answer to these questions, as they apply to theatrical
performance, is implicit in Paul Woodruff’s account of theater. Woodruff,
we may recall, holds that there is no theater without a watching audience:
“If no one is watching, it’s not theater, though it may truly be a perform-
ance” (2008, 42). But watching, Woodruff argues, requires something
worth watching, something we can care about, something to which we can
emotionally respond: “Theater depends on watching, watching depends on
caring, and caring depends on emotion” (154). The objects of our caring
and the focus of our emotions in a theatrical performance are generally the
characters. To care for the characters means, at least, that we want to know
what happens to them, and usually that we feel with and for them (148). To
eliminate altogether the audience’s empathetic responses to the characters
would be to fail in the art of theater (170). When an audience is not emotion-
ally engaged by any of the main characters, we have what Woodruff terms
“bad watching” which is really a failure to watch in the relevant sense (179).
“The nature of theater,” he maintains, “is to be watched; when it cannot be
watched it cannot be theater in the full sense; you must be fully capable
of empathy with the chief characters” (184). He acknowledges, however,
that a performance where we cannot emotionally engage with the charac-
ters might still be “worth watching” and thus qualify as theater in virtue of
its plot alone. While “theatrical reasons for watching a performance to the
end belong mainly to plot and characterization, and these are almost always
reasons for caring,” good plots can be reasons for watching theater even if we
don’t care about the characters: “A plot can keep us caring about events, by
stringing our emotions onto what happens next, as the plot works steadily
through complication toward resolution” (154).